Helping small businesses plan their email marketing strategy
According to US small businesses, email marketing has one of the best ROIs across their marketing tactics:
- 7% report an extraordinary ROI at over 20x spend
- 11% report excellent ROI at 10-19x spend
- 34% report good ROI at 5-9x spend
(BIA/Kelsey)
Email marketing continues to thrive as an essential marketing strategy for small businesses due to its low cost and ability to execute.
As a service provider, you need to be sharing educational content on how best to use your services, which can help improve activation, retention and brand value.
Consider sending automated onboarding content with helpful tips to customers
Sharing the below tips with customers will help them maximize their usage, report ROI, and grow their marketing budget to include other complementary services. Sales and support should also be trained with consultative positioning on top of product specifications.
What, when, and How to send:
- Promotional: Send emails to entice customers to make a purchase, with product info/pricing or a time-limited sale. Promotional emails should be short and sweet: make the offer clear, and create a sense of urgency.
- Upcoming events: Give customers a reason to visit sooner rather than later, by hosting local events, promoting a time-limited sale, or focusing on a holiday.
- New inventory/menu item/service: Show customers you’re on top of trends, and give your subscribers the added value of VIP insight into the latest and greatest.
- Newsletter: Break the copy in your newsletter into short, digestible and actionable sections of content, copy, images and calls to action. Topics might include: sales, events, recaps and photos, industry news, company news, etc.
- Educational: Provide customers with industry knowledge that’s connected to your business or product. It helps build relationships and trust between your business and your customers.
- Seasonal and holiday: Take advantage of stat holidays to reach out to customers, promoting related products or services at just the right time: window cleaning come spring, holiday shopping guide come October.
Did you know 40 percent of people check their phones within five minutes of waking up and 30 percent are checking their phones within 5 minutes before hitting the hay (Deloitte)? Too often, marketing emails are sent midday, when the marketers are working instead of considering and testing when your subscribers are scanning their inboxes—with time to click.
You should be testing the best times to send and experimenting with non-office hours to see if your open and click rates spike.
You want to communicate regularly without inundating your customers. You can experiment with different frequencies, and watch your open, click, and subscribe rates to see how customers are engaging when you send more or less often.
For most businesses, start with once a week or once every two weeks, and see what works best.
Share email/newsletter sign-up options on your website, blog, social media channels, or in-store promotions. These consumers are already aware of your business and are more likely to be receptive to additional contact.
All email marketing tools include a sign-up form you can embed on your website to help grow your list.
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